


Breath Beneath the Fallow Ground

by Chromat1cs



Series: Deepwood Wreathing [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Muggle, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Baron Sirius Black, Blood, Blood and Injury, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, M/M, Magical Realism, Mild Kink, Murder, Murder Husbands, Mutual Pining, Non-Explicit Sex, Pining, Prostitution, Rentboy Remus Lupin, Rentboys, Requited Love, Stabbing, but not between r/s wow could you imagine the nerve, it's sort of a blood kink but very inexplicit, someone call Jacques-Louis David because Sirius pulls a Marat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-07 00:04:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17355179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: Lord Black is ruined by three things: his devotion, his dreams, and the weight of a knife on his belt. The truest test of his limits, however, is the strength of the body he holds in his arms like some unsaid prayer.





	Breath Beneath the Fallow Ground

**Author's Note:**

> HI hello, thank you for returning, please read the tags and make sure this is something that won't bother you <3

The universe begins unraveling in early autumn.

Remus nestles himself back into one of Sirius’ embroidered throw pillows, the decorative ramparts that crown the bed like plush jewels, and draws a deeply satisfied drag on his cheroot. Naked, sated, one leg dangling from the edge of the mattress, he watches Sirius several paces away with a brilliant grin touching the corners of his lips.

“What.” Sirius can’t help but mirror a small smile at the rent boy as he wrings a washcloth into the basin on his bureau. The water is warm, perfumed with lavender, and he laves the cloth over and along his sex before squeezing it again into the basin and moving over to the bed.

Remus keeps his amused gaze on Sirius and lets his legs fall open, very near a provocation, his glorious default, as though he wasn’t fresh from an extremely athletic romp in the mussed sheets beneath him. Sirius obeys the compulsion to press a kiss to the inside of Remus’ knee when he moves to clean gently between the rent boy’s legs and over his stomach, a soft touch in the ritual that has quickly become one the dearest parts to him in the consummate gift that is the act of fucking Remus.

“Nothing.” Remus’ hum is light, and he watches Sirius wash him through another slow pull on his smoke. Exhaling, he idly pushes a hand into his curls and leaves it there for a moment. “You look quite radiant after we have at it.”

“Radiant?” Sirius raises an eyebrow as he stands to return the cloth to the washbasin, and he doesn’t care to pull on a dressing gown on his way to the small chest of coin on the bookshelf across the room. The weight of Remus’ eyes on his bare skin fills him with pride, and he wants ever more of it whenever he can get it.

“Like a star, all twinkly. Sounds sort of like your name, doesn’t it?” Remus’ voice tightens with a stretch, and Sirius glances over at him through the motion of unlocking the little iron box. The young man’s body pulls sweetly, deliciously, at all its own corners and edges beneath the golden plane of his skin through the movement, and Sirius snorts softly at both the nonsense joke and the feeling of his pulse beginning to chance at stirring again with the sight.

“You’re making that up. Your wit scalds, messire.” Sirius plucks up Remus’ payment, double for the absence of his lockbox after last Friday’s desperate, stumbling, shimmering union in a private room at Sirius’ club. He folds the bills tidily in his palm and returns to the bed, taking Remus’ offer of the cheroot and dragging softly on it as he holds out the money.

Remus sits forward and rifles through his payment with his thumb. Sirius is taken by the curve and fold of his lean stomach muscles, still sheened with light sweat and the traces of cleansing water, and so he doesn’t notice for a moment when Remus holds the full amount back out to him. Sirius looks up at the rent boy then, brows furrowed and cheroot still held between his lips, and frowns.

“What? It’s your money.”

“It’s too much.”

Sirius gives the young man a doubtful look and takes the punk out of his mouth to balance it between his fore and middle fingers. “Since when have you denied a bit of extra?”

“Twice my fee is ‘a bit’?”

Sirius rolls his eyes and gently pushes Remus’ hand back toward him. “Then consider it a gift.”

“Christmastide is still a month away and I’ve no need for anything glittery in the meantime. Take it back.” Remus presses the bills back into Sirius’ palm and the shape of their edges bite, benign, into his skin. Sirius pauses for a moment to look at where their hands join, graceful and tangled, pale and long against the stronger near-russet of Remus’ fingers, and feels his oxygen tighten in his chest as he drops his head slightly. His stomach plummets and churns with portentous wrenching. _Goddamn this, you stupid sot, you should have seen this coming._

“Do me the courtesy, please, of at least cutting me off cleanly if you’ve no desire to continue seeing me. I don’t wish to be strung along.”

Sirius’ voice is tight. He knows it’s dramatic, but words are suddenly spinning themselves out of nothing but the squeezing air in his lungs and the hurt of assuming the worst. Remus’ fingers spasm against his own and Sirius hears the young man’s breath arrest itself in his throat—suddenly the rent boy has leaned across the space between them to press a bruising kiss onto Sirius’ mouth. Remus pulls back, barely by an inch, before Sirius catches the instinct to return that twist of lips and tongue, and smoothes a hand across the back of Sirius’ neck overtop of his hair.

“You absolute idiot,” intimate and hoarse, and light with something else—is that adoration, hiding there in Remus’ consonants? “I’m not cutting you off. I’m trying to pull you closer.”

“What?”

Remus kisses him again and Sirius has the wherewithal to respond this time, a slow slide and suck through which he’s still confused. However, he finds himself almost half-hard when Remus pulls back a few moments later despite the cocktail of emotions fighting for primacy in Sirius’ guts. Those amber eyes, fossil eyes, _History lives in those eyes_ —light trapped within like some ancient creature frozen behind Remus’ pupils, left to careen through life out of his own time. Sirius blinks, unsure of from where that thought had spun, and tried instead to focus on the way that burning gaze watches him carefully.

“I think it’s high time you stop paying me. This is no longer business for me, I daresay it’s much more entirely pleasure.”

Sirius watches the shapes of Remus’ lips making those words and still needs an extra moment of comprehension before his mind catches up with his heartbeat and he’s suddenly nodding, slightly unhinged for the voracity if his approval. “I—of course, whatever suits you best.” His voice feels dry and his heart is surging with a double-draught of elation and shock, but he invites openly another long kiss from Remus. It ends with the rent boy easing Sirius down into the sheets, his back pressed against the silk and linen with Remus’ hand pressed to his chest, his hair sprawling beneath his head, his money scraping loosely at his hip where he had dropped the bills.

Remus kneels above him, straddling his waist and growing ready for it again as well, and plucks the cheroot from Sirius’ fingers with another grin that flashes of mostly teeth and just a hint of true gravitas while he sucks in another drag of smoke. “ _You_ suit me best,” murmured on a fragrant exhale that plumes from his lips like steam in the cold— _Wolf in the forest, howling low and long, how have I gone so long without you beside me_ —Sirius leans up and pulls Remus into his own kiss at that to shut off the overactive edge of his strangest fantasies. Long dreams lately have been twisting, with color and heat and strange flashes of things that feel like true memories, and they’re more vivid when he sleeps beside Remus.

But for now they aren’t sleeping. Sirius holds Remus behind the knee and tugs forward, drawing out a sound like the summertime just past, and doesn’t need to open his eyes to extinguish the cheroot on the dish atop the nightstand. They exist in the dark, these men made of their sharp angles and their uneven breathing, and Sirius would have it no other way had he even been given the choice.

—

The air grows colder, the first true frost takes the city like an undeserved vindication, and Sirius grows lonely for a short stretch of days. The threads of his expectations are coming undone between his fingers, and it’s surely a sign of his growing madness that he doesn’t mind at all. Perhaps he inherited the twisting beckon of his father’s minor insanity after all.

For two weeks now, Remus has had a new client; one Amycus Carrow, who pays handsomely but tends to keep Remus occupied for far longer to get his money’s worth. Carrow is an earl, a product of an extended and cankerous lineage of men who know too much and care too little, and owns most of the southern countryside outside the city. He’s taken Remus to one of his estates in Crawley for four days. Sirius is trying not to devour himself from the anxiety.

When did this begin? He used to be able to go an entire week without seeing Remus and be more than fine at the end of it—a stark change from the present compulsion to tear at his skin in tiny, incessant rips, the need to dig delicately at each layer of himself like some sort of archaeologist’s wet dream filled with the relics of longing and a mummified body made from Sirius’ own deepest desires. The need to simply have Remus, constantly and forever, is confounding in a way Lord Black finds not entirely awful.

The pounding on the door jettisons Sirius from his thoughts, bent nearly double over his ledger with the pen poised and about to drip over the margin.

He stands slowly from the desk with a wince as his lower back creaks like the frame of the vacated chair, and Sirius pauses with a frown when another sharp tattoo of summons rattles through the study door. “Peter?”

_“Me, fucking open up.”_

Sirius’ heart leaps into his throat and he’s across the study in two, three, four long strides, nearly at a run, to unlock and wrench open the door to reveal Remus in person with a countenance that matches the hurried sotto of his voice through the jamb. Sirius’ breath seizes like ice and his eyes go wide, sure as a storm as blind fury floods his insides, when he sees Remus leaning heavily against the wall.

A dark smear of drying blood is splattered out of the young man’s nose, down his lips and chin as though he had swiped and staunched it hastily with a kerchief, _No,_ his sleeve—Sirius’ darting eyes see its stain by the wrist of Remus’ blue coat, some other gift from someone who isn’t him. A horrid bloom of mottled red swallows the height of Remus’ right jaw, and the beginnings of a black eye are deepening in purplish vigor around the same side’s eye socket. Beneath it all, Remus’ expression is livid. Sirius can only stare for another moment, standing aside when Remus pushes past him gently with a light wince, before his words catch up with his thoughts.

“What the fuck happened?” He feels the desperate wheeze in his voice before he hears it, and Remus sits heavily on the armchair beside the bookcase without removing his coat.

“I said no.”

Sirius shuts the door and locks it softly again, his hands trembling with a sort of distant rage at whomever did this to him, whomever it is that has the audacity to think Remus can be harmed and not draw up the ancient rage of Sirius’ bloodline— _Carrow_. Sirius turns and looks up at Remus then with the name slamming into his mind’s eye like a hideous marquee, and Remus’ gaze burns back at Sirius from his slouch with their unspoken harmony to confirm that yes, Carrow is responsible.

Sirius wishes intenly for something to strangle.

“Did he—?” Sirius finds his voice choked as he tries to say it, fails, can’t put to words the horrific possibility of Remus being violated in the way upon which Sirius has never let himself ruminate; that terrifying reality of too many rentfolk, one Sirius has always told himself Remus is too smart to fall into. But of course, Sirius realizes in a moment with a staggering yank on his heart, intelligence has absolutely nothing to do with it. All it takes is one grotesque client.

Remus takes up his meaning and shakes his head, and Sirius might whimper with relief as he leans back heavily against his desk. The ringing in his ears, a twined rope of easement and continued rage, is too loud for anything beyond attention to Remus.

“He only hit me.”

 _“Only.”_ The rough-edged fury in Sirius’ hiss surprises both of them, evident in the flashing behind Remus’ golden gaze.

“I got away from him, be fucking grateful, yeah?”

It’s been a long time since Remus has snapped at him, and Sirius sees tension leagues deep behind the rent boy’s expression. He senses, at a far reach, the need for commiseration in this moment, but all Sirius can grasp in his shaking fists is hate.

“Grateful?” Sirius pushes off the lip of the desk as he feels fire begin swallowing his organs. He stalks along the carpet in a tight and mindless line in front of the armchair, his shoulders weighty with the press of raw anger. “I’m supposed to be _grateful_ that some fucking dandy decided he has the right to lay his hands on you, knowing you can’t fight back unless you want the law at your goddamned throat?” Sirius clenches his jaw and looks back at Remus, breath grown heavy and fast while a distant part of him recalls that Remus is sitting in the chair in which they’d first had each other.

Remus dabs uselessly at the crusted gore from his nose with another edge of his sleeve, looking tired and pained and furious, and Sirius casts about with a start for something to help him wash. “I’ve seen people cut and gutted and thrown into the fucking river, Sirius, so yes. I expect you to be _grateful_ I got out with both my eyes in my fucking head and all my extremities still attached.”

Remus is glaring when Sirius meets his eyes again, back from the opposite end of the study with a finger washing bowl and a silk handkerchief, and the disappointment meeting him there is alarming. Sirius’ stomach knots around itself in several twists, but nonetheless he kneels in front of the young man. Remus isn’t finished, clearly filled with compacted anger that he must let fly, and so Sirius grits his teeth silently and weathers it; “I haven’t shown you this side of things because I don’t even know how to parse it sometimes, do you understand that? When a client expects something, he doesn’t like to be denied. He’s paying, he’s controlling the exchange—it’s a _business_ and I’m a _worker_ , and if I don’t comply to their tastes then sometimes I get fucked. Figuratively.” Remus bitterly avoids his look when Sirius glances up at him from wetting the tip of the cloth, but he doesn’t flinch away from Sirius reaching up to begin gently cleaning at his face. The young man is quiet for several seconds, staring into the empty dark of the outside sliver just visible through the drawn curtains across the room, before a nearly noiseless sigh leaves him like a deflation.

“You’ve spoiled me, Sirius,” a whisper so faint that Sirius feels every wall of his heart shudder to behold it. “You’ve made me so used to comfort, and I can hardly stomach it anymore when I don’t get that from anybody else.”

Sirius pauses with the cloth beneath Remus’ nose, sluicing the scabbing and rusty blood away from his skin, and blinks away the emotion he feels prickling behind his eyes in a sudden pang when Remus finally looks at him again. So much of the unsaid swirls in that look, waves of history winnowing through his sight that he _must_ feel as deeply as Sirius despite the utter lack of explanation from where all the echoes of connection come. They are bound, Sirius understands in that moment, in more ways than he might ever know.

His mouth is leaden when he finally speaks, but he finds the words regardless. “Why did he do this to you?”

Remus bites his lips together in his usual tell of reluctance, but he flinches with a hiss when the movement presses on a split along his bottom lip. He probes the wound carefully with the tip of his tongue and avoids Sirius’ worried stare with fastidious care.

“I refused to kiss him.”

Sirius bites down hard on his own lip when another wave of complicated sensation wells up in his chest. He blinks rapidly and glances to floor, where he nods at the whorls of the carpet and stays his rioting heart— _Do not cry, don’t you dare cry, you aren’t the one just now beaten to a pulp._

“I’m going to kill him.”

The words sear the air like Hades’ steam itself, and Sirius finds himself surprised to feel not shock in their wake but determination. He nods again, distantly, deciding in an instant that this man before him will be the beginning and ending of anything that has ever mattered in this pit of a city. “I’m going to fucking kill him.”

Remus’ gentle touch cards into Sirius’ hair and he closes his eyes, rests his cheek against the couch cushion between Remus’ parted knees where the young man cradles Sirius in comfort, strange and silent and solely for the two of them.

Later, abed, Sirius finds himself in much the same position—Remus’ hands soft and warm at the back of his neck as Sirius presses his nose against the crepuscular curve of Remus’ neck. “I’ve been dreaming again, more and deeply.” Remus’ murmured postcoital voice hums through his skin and up along Sirius’ mouth, and Sirius nods into the warmth.

“As have I. Woods, wolves, lots of trees and snow.” Drawn out of him like sucking venom, it wracks Sirius with a freeing tug to speak the truth to life against Remus’ throat. They’re silent for several long seconds as Remus simply nods, his hair scraping in a hush against the pillows beneath him and the bandage fixed carefully to one cheekbone.

“What do you think they mean?” Remus moves his own mouth to the fragrant haven of Sirius’ hair to muffle his words there, inhale Sirius’ scent with a light sound that whispers sweetly at Sirius’ innermost affections.

Sirius kisses him, dart of tongue through his teeth to lick away the trace of salt there, with a slow parting of his lips before he answers. “I’m inclined to believe they’re some kind of message.” He punctuates a pause in his whisper with another kiss, tracing Remus’ arteries as Remus begins a steady pull of his fingers through Sirius’ hair. “Something not entirely of our understanding.”

“What, magic?”

“Perhaps.”

“I never would have thought you to truly believe in anything like that.” Remus smiles ever so slightly through his words and Sirius feels it against the crown of his head, anointing him with that rich oil of ardor drummed up between the two of them like heat between vigorous palms in the cold every time they complete one another like this in the dark. He tightens his hold around Remus’ shoulder, a reaching hold as though Remus were pulling him up from some precarious drop, and tucks his head back against the young man’s collarbone.

Here, Sirius is whole. Folded against this body, he is, somehow, home.

“Neither would I.”

—

Rain pelts the streets in angry spittle, frigid as it falls but not quite cold enough for a snow. The brim of Sirius’ hat tips low along his forehead as he walks, brisk, in and down byways he knows like language but hasn’t had to walk in many years.

 _Stay here,_ his hushed bid to Remus as he drew the black woolen greatcoat around his shoulders. _Don’t leave the house, I don’t want you hurt again._

 _Calm yourself, Lord Harrowheart, I’ve no plans to sniff the bastard out again._ Remus had watched him with an irritated frown, dressed halfway in one of Sirius’ shirts without trousers while still trussed in the warm bed sheets. But he had listened, however petulantly, and resigned himself to an evening kept within the bedroom after already spending an indulgent day of the same. Sirius feels a slicing sort of hurt somewhere deep in his guts every time he looks at the bruise ringing the young man’s eye or the scratches now scabbing along his face, somehow sharpening Remus’ feral stare instead of dimming it but still reminding Sirius that someone is awake right now who had dared to do something so brutal.

Sirius hadn’t been so brash as to ask Remus if the earl had returned to the city and simply sent Peter to ask after Carrow’s manor that morning. With his black Black luck, the demon and his minor entourage had pulled into the drive just as Peter arrived to inquire.

_There will be one less rotten hellspawn in this godforsaken city after tonight._

This compulsion, this poison pulsing in Sirius’ marrow, is utterly foreign to him. Foreign, but not unfamiliar to his instincts. He walks with a singular purpose and a weight strapped to his belt he isn’t used to carrying outside the woods of Colchester. Rain pelts his shoulders, and the light of the streetlamps catches at his figure with useless and unfelt pulls like fingers snapping apart as he barrels through them.

There is only room right now for retribution.

When he knocks on Carrow’s front door, he raps just twice and with the ornate knocker instead of with his fist mad against the wood with his ungloved skin punching, over and over, to herald yet-unseen death. A maid answers in tidy black uniform. _Fitting._

“Good evening, sir, have you an appointment?”

The young woman blinks prettily, wide green eyes and red curls framing her face, and Sirius has a flash of Gideon’s face then—it feels like an ancient memory at this point, a relic of who he was before he entire soul had been set fire with one look of another pair of eyes poured from the molten gold of the gods themselves. He forces a smile to his face, as smooth as he can reach with such humming fury in his veins.

“Yes, madam, one Lord Black from Mayfair. How do you do?”

The maid returns his smile with a short little bow of her head. “Fine, thank you, sir. I’ll only check with milord’s records—”

Sirius’ throat seizes and he quickly slides halfway into the door before he knows what he’s doing, only to arrest the woman’s quick-footed movement back into wherever Carrow keeps count of his visitors. The young woman pales and Sirius can see the terror of self-preservation fly up behind her eyes, but he raises a hand and gestures in a small way for silence. _Think, bloody think, Sirius, why would you be here—_

Sirius’ blood boils as he leans in with what he hopes is a conspiratorial angle to whisper, “I will ask, milady, for discretion in this most private of matters.” Inwardly, he prays with wild purchase that Carrow at least shares an ounce of his private life with his staff as Sirius chooses to with his own valets, _They would have to know if he just had Remus away with him._ The woman’s jaw clenches and she swallows, her eyes flicking over Sirius as his coat drips faintly on the foyer floor and he stares back at with perhaps just a flicker of madness behind his pupils—enough for her to nod with a stuttering little motion.

“I—yes, of course, my lord. Lord Carrow has retired for the night, you can find him in his quarters on the third floor.”

Sirius does not let himself deflate with relief. “Thank you, madam. Shall I need a key?”

The young woman rustles busily into a pocket tied along one of her skirts, and she holds it out to Sirius as though it might be hot from the forge. “Here, I—apologies, sir, for assuming.”

“Not a worry at all. Good evening.”

Sirius is off before the young woman returns the pleasantry, up to the winding and fashionable staircase while the rain begins to lash at the long windows that face him at each floor’s landing. The new moon without serves a dark palette over the night, _All the better for returning unseen,_ as Sirius stalks up to Carrow’s room like a portent woven from all the wet soot of Sirius’ lineage.

Not a single other member of the household passes Sirius as he goes, and he slips the key into the largest carved door at the end of the third floor hallway. It gives with a well-oiled slide before Sirius slips in, silent, shuts it behind him and re-locks the latch before jamming the key in between two thick volumes on the bookshelf beside the door. _If they want to find his body, they’ll need to bloody dig for him._

Sirius turns in a slow circle to take in a tidy and vaguely spartan bedchamber, garlanded with all the comforts of lordship but devoid of many things that could make it feel warm or like a place where a human took his rest instead of a blighted insect. The bed is massive and yet undisturbed, leatherbound books are strewn and stacked but slightly dusted with disuse—the only true show of habitude is a massive wardrobe lain open with clothing halfway out of a traveling trunk, in the midst of behind re-organized after a trip.

Sirius’ knuckles pop faintly as he clenches an idle fist.

The soft sound of water splashing filters across the chamber from an adjoining bathroom, its door laying slightly ajar. Sirius picks his way silently across the sinfully-plush carpet in thankful silence and peers through the open gap as his rage surfaces in quiet, seething rolls. Carrow is facing the wall opposite the door and washing himself over the shoulders a-seat in the bathtub, his powerful back corded with all the sorts of muscles that used to set Sirius’ deepest nighttime imaginings flying but now can only make him think of ripping those sinews apart with his bare hands. Sirius enters with a single ringing step and slams the door shut behind him to startle the earl with an undignified yelp.

“Good evening.” Sirius’ voice is bordered with the distilled essence of his father’s malice and, he finds as he tastes the fury on his tongue, a bit of his mother’s as well.

“What the bloody fuck are you doing in here?!” Carrow speaks high in his neck, an untrained and warbling sound completely at odds with his general shape and his thickly-waxed mustache. Sirius takes a moment to glare at the man, glad for his coat and his hat and the general image of doom his natural complexion can lend the act of simply standing in a room in which he shouldn’t be.

“Did you have a fine stay in the country?”

“Get out, this instant! Who the hell let you up here, _Emily!”_ Carrow casts about in an almost comical bid for purchase on something that isn’t a bar of soap before he tries calling out. But the doors are heavy and Sirius is quick in his limbs, and he clatters into a kneel beside the tub and grabs Carrow around the neck with one hand before the earl can draw breath to shout again, thrashing in the water and immediately prying at Sirius’ fingers.

“I am Lord Sirius Black of Essex,” Sirius snarls over the sound of Carrow’s struggle—all animal, all hound, he feels his lip pulling back from his top teeth and sees terror and confusion in Carrow’s eyes as his face begins to darken while his wet hands slip uselessly at Sirius’ grip. Sirius stabilizes himself on the porcelain lip of the bath and redoubles his grip on the man’s neck, relishing the panicked wheeze he gets in return. “You had a rent boy with you in Crawley, what was his name?”

Sirius slackens his hold ever so slightly to let just enough air through the man’s throat for him to speak. Instead the earl lashes out with an ill-judged fist, and Sirius dodges it with a splash and replies with a slamming punch of his own to Carrow’s side. The man groans with a broken cry, crumpling, and Sirius shakes him by the neck to force their eyes to meet again. “If you try that again,” he warns with dark purpose, “I will do far more than just mirror you. You had a rent boy. In Crawley. What. Was his _name.”_

Carrow’s purpling lips work at the shape of a word, and Sirius slackens his hold again with slow caution. _“Ulfur,”_ Carrow wheezes, _“some arctic whore, has an accent.”_

 _“There_ it is.” Sirius leans in close, nose nearly touching Carrow’s own as he reaches into his coat and draws out the steel length of his hunting knife. Carrow’s eyes go wide and he thrashes again, the instinctual shove of fear, but Sirius presses the sharp of the blade against Carrow’s collar to still him in an instant. “You beat him bloody, didn’t you?”

With the knife placed as a promising warning, Sirius relaxes the hold on the earl’s neck to let him gasp and cough several ugly, retching breaths. “And what about it?” he finally rasps. Sirius’ heart blackens and adrenaline surges into him with the lack of denial.

“Apologize.”

“To _you?”_

“Yes.”

“Will it get that fucking knife away from my neck?” Carrow stares him down like a crocodile and Sirius finds a channel through which to hate him even deeper.

“No.”

Carrow snorts, a strangely brave show of recklessness in the face of certain danger, but still harbors a grimey layer of terror in his pinprick pupils. “He was a brat, you know. If you’re doing this to try and impress him, he won’t care.”

Sirius’ grip tightens on the bone handle of his knife, and he takes a thin thread of pleasure to see Carrow glance at it with poorly-covered alarm. “I’m not trying to impress anybody, Lord Carrow, I assure you.”

“Aren’t you now?”

_“Apologize.”_

Carrow’s arrogance is actively bleeding through his horror by now as he chooses to smirk in silence, and so Sirius digs his knifepoint against the knot of muscle and bone at the height if the earl’s shoulder to draw a thick and watery bead of _real_ blood, wine blood, ox blood from this beast of a man, to make Carrow cry out and attempt to rip away from Sirius again. The bathwater shatters around the earl’s body like glass but Sirius holds him fast, careless of soaking his clothes, _Didn’t the rain already do that?_ He twists his knife again and pulls another ugly pule from behind Carrow’s teeth before it turns into a bawl and _“Alright!”_

Sirius pauses, breath heaving, arms soaked, muscles and tendons corded with blind vengeance while Carrow sucks on air and his shoulder weeps a heavy red ooze. “Alright,” he cries again, “I’m sorry, you fuck, I’m sorry I beat some fucking _sense_ into that slut! If you’re drooling to fuck him go right ahead, you’ll want to hit him just as well! He’s a damn good suck but he has a foul fucking mouth, so take it from me and just gag the scandie bitch before you do! Now _get out!”_

A chill courses through Sirius’ body in an encompassing heartbeat as something more sinister than plain fury floods his veins. A frozen second passes before Sirius is surging forward, his teeth bared, fit to bite if he could himself but he’s the long fang of his knife, and so he reels back and plunges it, deep and ripping, over and over again into Carrow’s broad chest. He squeezes anew at the earl’s neck as he unleashes the pent-up madness, this burst levee tamping down all his frustration at the city as a whole, to keep the bastard from screaming to alert the entire household to the possibility of anything besides fucking—although this is a different kind of fucking, Sirius supposes with the single corner of his thoughts left in sanity as he renders the earl limp and bleeding into the fray of splashing in the tub; this is ruining, damaging, a physical manifestation of the figurative _Fuck_ Remus had brought up last night. _It’s a business and I’m a worker, and if I don’t comply to their tastes then sometimes I get fucked._

“Fuck you, Carrow.”

Sirius’ voice is shaking and raw with residual anger as he staggers to his feet, wipes his knife messily across its flats onto his greatcoat, and stares at the carnage before him. His forearms are covered in water and blood, the pinkish spoor of it smattered along his entire upper body and smearing over his jaw as he wipes anxiously at his mouth, and the tiled floor is a mess of water and gore and drying soap suds. Carrow fights for holey catches of breath through his ruined airways, pouring crimson and draped like a ragdoll along the far edge of the bath while his eyes roll to the ceiling with the shuttering, fading light of consciousness. Sirius spends several more heaving breaths to center himself as he returns to his own body, shaken and sheared but sure in what he’s just done, before he vaults onto the lattice outside the open window, heedless of the rain, and scrabbles back to the street where he can flee as surely as any other sodden walker down the alleys.

_Fuck you, Carrow. Fuck you, Carrow. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck._

—

Remus is up and attentive the moment Sirius stumbles back home.

“What happened?” A breathless question, struck still for a moment to behold Sirius soaking and panting and shaking as he leans back against the bedroom door to shut it solidly behind him.

“Killed, I killed him,” Sirius whispers, “stabbed him in the bath, he’s dead. He can’t hurt you, Remus, he’s dead.”

Sirius sheds his hat with a throw to the floor and slides down into a sit, and he vaguely catalogues Remus folding into a kneel beside him; cool hand to Sirius’ cheek, soft and almost disbelieving voice near his ear—almost; “Did you kill Carrow?”

Sirius nods, unhooks the sheathed knife from his belt and drops that to the floor as well, begins shrugging out of his coat as though the heavy fabric is beginning to itch madly at his damp clothes, it is, it _does_ itch, his skin beneath the blood that isn’t his all dashed across his arms and chest is itching. He breathes in deep, even gulps of air and stares straight ahead even as Remus pats at his face to try and pull at his attention. “I didn’t know you truly meant to do it.”

“Neither did I.”

Sirius blinks and flicks his eyes about the bedroom—so much more lived-in than Carrow’s bloody monastery, _blood,_ no, not here, there isn’t a bathroom over there, there isn’t a body floating and unfound anywhere in this room, _blood, blood, blood, “Fuck.”_ Sirius’ breath begins pulling quick and shallow through his lungs, and he’s about to stand and begin pacing when Remus’ other hand touches gently at the other side of Sirius’ face and guides him gently to meet his eyes.

“Sirius, you’re alright.” From so near, Remus is summertime. When he looks at Remus it isn’t raining, nor is there isn’t blood on his skin or ringing in his ears. Those twinned suns stare into Sirius, down to his depths, down to the part of Sirius that has just snuffed a life, and Remus isn’t pushing him away. Remus is pulling him close and Remus is kissing him, and when he pulls back the jot of dried blood on his chin should disgust Sirius but it _doesn’t,_ lights instead something jagged and violent but deeply delicious at the pit of Sirius’ core. He surges forward, starving for the feeling of Remus against him, his balance skewing him out of his sit to lean hard against Remus, and the young man holds him, clings to him just as fiercely, and shares the same hunger as they just as well as tear open their ribs to one another with wet, red mouths and insistent fingers.

Sirius takes Remus, intently and deeply, there against the wall; bedraggled and addled, they lose themselves to their bodies and the slide of rainwater and blood. There, with his greatcoat still on and his trousers only half-down, with one hand gripping strong and intent at the russet warmth of Remus’ skin and the other buried in his curls, Sirius tips the young man’s head back to make him gasp at the ceiling, cry out in bliss around a half-breath as Sirius pushes into him deep and slow—“Run away with me,” Sirius begs him, watches him in rapture as though Remus has begun and will someday end life itself.

Remus bows his head against Sirius’ shoulder and nods, and Sirius’ soul threatens to leap from his mouth and vault itself into the storming sky. “Into the woods.” His lips and teeth scrape at Sirius’ skin with each word and Sirius growls, assenting, delving into Remus anew with the promise of escape.

Sirius sucks softly at Remus’ throat, virile throat, the well of life itself and he adores it, he loves it so entirely and frees the compulsion to murmur, “You’ve been dreaming again, more and deeply,” with an unbidden smile to paint himself the picture of contrast in all his dishevelment.

Remus rears up to kiss him in a deep twist of his tongue, with an unexpected roll of his hips that makes Sirius moan against it. The young man pulls back and his eyes flash, pinning Sirius like a dried moth in deepest love with its spreading board. “And I’ll gladly continue to do so,” Remus whispers, “as long as you’ll have me.”

They crash back together, eager waves at the shores of one anothers’ hearts pressing eternally at the limits of those eroding walls around them.

In but an hour, they’ll leave London and never look back.

They’ve finally found forever.

**Author's Note:**

> It's done!! I feel that 4 parts it the perfect length for this series, a doubled diptych of sorts. Quadtych? If that's a thing. Thank you, thank you, THANK you for all the support and love for this series, it truly means the world. That a 24hr Challenge drabble became something so dear to my imagination and the way I've experimented with my narrative is such an amazing turn of events, and I'm so grateful to have you all as readers. There's much good to come down the road, so please stay tuned! Thank you again for reading, from the bottom of my little dramatic heart.


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